| Observations of a Newly Minted Older Person
| Louis Tenenbaum

| Part 1 of a 4-part series: The Only Test That Matters  

A home that works is worth having whether you stay 2 years or 20

The same issue has come up twice recently, from very different directions. It’s a basic one — and persistent. This four-column series is my attempt to clarify it.

The problem is that we approach building backwards. We wait for a diagnosis, an injury, or a moment of crisis — and then we respond. Since remodeling takes time to be done well, urgency undermines the functional process.

And all along, we celebrate aging in place while continuing to design and build homes that fall short in the critical details. They work right up to the moment they’re needed. That’s when the details start to matter.

Timed for the 2026 American Society on Aging and National Aging in Place Council meetings, this series looks at that gap — and what we may do to fill it.

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There is a phrase that comes up regularly in remodeling conversations, usually early, usually in response to a question about long-term plans: “This may not be our forever home.”

It is meant to be practical. And in a sense it is — it’s shorthand for don’t oversell us, we’re not committing to this house for life. Reasonable enough. Except that what follows, reliably, is a quiet shift in decisions. (Maneuvering) spaces tighten. Showers get sleeker and less functional. Appliances get stacked. The assumption settles in that if the home isn’t forever, it doesn’t need to work quite as well.

Which is a strange way to think about home.

We don’t apply this logic to other features. A homeowner might choose simpler cabinets or defer the higher-end countertops — sensible trade-offs, and none of them affect how well the house functions. You can upgrade finishes later. What you can’t easily upgrade is the layout, the entry, the clearances, the basic architecture of how the space works. Once those decisions are made, they get built in, and they tend to stay.

Universal Design belongs in that first category — the functional decisions — not the second. A no-step entry, adequate maneuvering space, good lighting, reachable controls, a bathroom that can actually be used safely: these are not specialty features added for a particular kind of occupant. They are just part of a home that works. And a home that works is worth having whether you stay 2 years or 20.

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There is also the small matter of what life tends to do in the meantime. Mobility limitations are not a condition reserved for old age or long tenure. They arrive after surgery, after injury, after illness, sometimes just after a bad week. When they do, the home either handles it or it doesn’t. “We’ll fix it later” is a reasonable plan right up until later arrives unexpectedly, at which point it turns out there isn’t much later available — only what’s already there.

The “forever home” framing is, in the end, a category error. It treats Universal Design as a lifestyle commitment rather than a construction standard. How long you stay is one question. Whether the home works is a different one entirely — and the more important one.

Pundits and professionals talk a lot about aging in place, Universal Design, and the idea of a “forever home,” as if these were separate conversations. They’re not. They are all ways of asking the same question: does the home meet your needs?

In the end, that’s the only test that matters. Not how it looks on a plan or in a photograph, but how it performs when something goes wrong. And things often do.

The next column looks at where this gap shows up most clearly: the bathroom.

Louis Tenenbaum is a longtime advocate for aging in place, co-founder of the HomesRenewed™ Coalition, the HomesRenewed™ Resource Center, and HomesRenewed Ventures, LLC and a nationally recognized expert on home modifications that support independent living. Discover more columns in this series.